What is Transliteracy? This is something that you need to know about.

Transliteracy is a term that I knew nothing about, until 10 months ago. It is a term that is trending right now. Is it really a trend or a major change in education to stop a vicious cycle? You always hear veteran teachers talk about how when you teach long enough you will see the pendulum swing back and forth. Well, they are right. After 11 years of teaching I have seen just that. The teaching profession has shifted from fidelity to adopted curriculum to now using supplemental materials when needed to teach the standards. I see transliteracy as the middle point in this constant battle of what is the best way to increase test scores nationwide. It’s taking the “old school” way of paper/pencil and direct instruction and merging it with the “new school” way of technology and collaboration. Blending and merging two very different styles of teaching in my opinion will produce the best possible outcome. In time, transliteracy might just be what we need for more students to be proficient. Student can be support at their ability level all while engaging them in the lesson or course work. This is what will ultimately increase test scores. Those struggling students need to be engaged and adding technology pieces to the content and pedagogy might be just what they need to succeed. ​​

Why are 21st century skills so important?

Year after year the same students struggle with reading comprehension. They continue to fall below the benchmark at every grade level despite the interventions that they receive by the classroom teacher and other support staff. That’s why I decided to see what impact technology played in improving student reading comprehension of grade level text.

​Only 36% of 4th graders nationwide are reading at grade level, and the number is below 50% among all grades in California. In order to close the achievement gap, how teachers intervene and support struggling readers needs to change. I wanted to know if technology could help these students. With audio components and text to speech options available for state testing, what tools could help students on a daily basis?​

Figure 1: Data from round 1.

When analyzing the data collection from the whole class, 46 % of students showed improvement in grade level reading comprehension. Urgent, intervention, on watch and at/above grade level band averages can be seen below in figure 1.

This indicates that the use of technology tools that support grade level text could indeed help some students improve their reading comprehension. It is apparent that the use of technology had a greater impact with students who were not reading at grade level. ​This knowledge is helpful to teachers and parents so that all children can have a better chance at success

when assessing grade level content. Help can be provided at home through the use of adaptive programs like Istation. Check out my assessment page for more explanation of results from my study. ​

Examples of Google form assessments that were used in this study along with an explanation of results from both rounds of data collection can be found on this page.

Educational Tools to use in the Classroom

​Clickon theicons belowto take you directly to their website.

​Freckle is an adaptive website that allows students to work on common core standards.

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​Raz-Kids offers online access to level readers.

EDpuzzle is a great resource for educational videos that allow you to create and insert your own questions.

Standards

​During the two rounds of action research that I conducted my end goal was to see if student's comprehension of grade level text improved with the help of digital tools. Ultimately I was assessing theCCSS.ELALITERACY.RL.3.1standard of, "Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers."